When the skeletal remains of a man brought down by shotgun surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer, drinker, and ex-cop Mario Conte reluctantly accepts a reinstatement to investigate the forty-year-old crime. As the truth of the night of October 3, 1958, slowly reveals itself, Conte must come to terms with his idealistic memory of Papa Hemingway on Cuba's sun-drenched docks, back when Conde was a child tagging along with his grandfather." Padura Fuentes weaves Conte's world with that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier, a period marking the beginning of Hemingway's decline. In the heat-and-rum haze, the eras and personas begin to merge.